the domestic experience as art: january 2010 – march 2011

set within my suburban south florida hometown, this blog documented my process of living at home post-college, figuring out what I really want to do with my life, and moving forward through a series of daily art thoughts and projects.

applying to jobs: slave to the word-count.

Today my biggest accomplishment was finally finishing this application to an AmeriCorps job in Philadelphia. It’s been driving me nuts because it feels like the lamest college admission essay prompt — but actually its more like I feel like the lamest, most generic, over-enthusiastic-about-community, college-educated girl ever. I have to reduce my explanation of why I’m skilled at community organizing to this: “I studied and practiced organizing communities through organizing events and programs in my college and the local town organizations; I also completed a Grassroots Community Development course.”

And Fine Arts/Crafts to this: “I have taken 8 years of higher level art classes through my schooling. I am skilled in creating utilitarian, structural, and wearable objects out of largely recycled or re-purposed materials.”

I know it’s useful to be really concise and force myself to write about what I do and want to do in really quick “sound bites” but it makes me feel ingenuine or like what I’m doing is naive and not very well thought out.

Anyways, it looks really great.

North 5th Street Business Revitilization

N5SRP is a community-based revitalization project, located directly on
the North 5th Street Commercial Corridor. N5SRP is dedicated to serving
both the local businesses and residential community though the physical,
economic, and cultural revitalization of North 5th St and the greater
Olney community. The VISTA’s core duties will increase the capacity of
N5SRP specifically in the areas of (1) community outreach (to business
owners, property owners, and residents) and (2) business sustainability
research (which will enable N5SRP to make better programmatic decisions).

Basically, its a job that encompasses a lot of what I’ve been trying to do, but it’s in a “real life” community and a paying job by a “real life” government! our government!

tomorrow is a sewing day. I am not being a business lady all day. I asked my secretary to schedule in a solid block of time into my schedule for sewing, and she dutifully complied.

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One comment

Aliya! That was my least favorite part of the AmeriCorps application too! I’m pretty much applying to things in Portland (now anyway: I applied to something in San Fran, actually got it, but decided I couldn’t justify it financially, or at least couldn’t decide to in my three-hour decision-making deadline).

Also, it’s easy to feel naive with local community revitalization efforts. Lord knows I dish out mental criticism to a lot of efforts, but often when faced with a naive arts-based revitalization processes, I roll my eyes and think, “Now ALIYA would have done this totally differently…” Good luck.